The Stressor Processor
The Stress of Training requires Training for Stress
Recently, in a social media group dedicated to running, the question was posed (paraphrasing): “As a coach, how do you know when to increase training load, and when to de-load?” This cuts to the heart of any training plan; without appropriate training stress load, improvements will not happen. But as we all know — or quickly find out the hard way — too much of a Good Thing can become a Bad Thing. There’s a physiological limit to how much training load we can handle. In a nutshell, here’s what I tell my athletes:
Gather pebbles; don’t try to lift boulders. Consistency reigns supreme. It’s the Day In-Day Out incremental progress which paves the path to our Personal Best (PB).
Stress is stress. Physical, mental, emotional; our bodies do not differentiate between types of stress. We do not have separate buckets for work stress versus relationship stress, running stress versus financial stress, etc. It all lands in one bucket — our body.
Sleep is non-negotiable. We all have a bad night of sleep, or some scheduling thing which cuts into our full-night’s sleep, etc. That’s life on life’s terms. But our bodies keep a ledger; at some point, it’s going to demand a payment against the sleep debt we’ve accrued. Either take the time to make the time to have the time to get the sleep needed, or the body is going to take that time FROM you. Injury, illness, or both (minimum!) will be the price.
The workout we do today is NOT what makes us stronger, faster, better. It’s the recovery from that workout which is what creates adaptations and improvements. Therefore, approach each workout not with the mindset of how hard you’re going to smash it, but instead, approach it with the mindset of “How is what I’m doing today going to feed into tomorrow’s adaptation cycle?” In other words, take stock of how you’re feeling (physically, mentally, and emotionally), and balance that against the long(er) term demands ahead. If I’m not feeling great for whatever reason (didn’t sleep well; ate something that disagreed with the stomach; still steaming from an unjustified chewing-out by the boss; etc.), then maybe today we need to tone down the workout so the rest of the week is achievable. Or, maybe today is the day to smash it, knowing that there is sufficient time in the days ahead to rest and recover.
Let’s deep-dive into what science has uncovered, and then examine how the Breath Runner Method incorporates these anchor points into its training plans.
We’ve previously discussed the Bell Curve of Happiness, otherwise known as appropriate training loads. Most people know the term homeostasis, which refers to an organism’s or a system’s desire to find a neutral state of equilibrium. This is all well and good, but it doesn’t help us get stronger, faster, or win races. We need to upset the proverbial apple cart in order to generate the changes needed for performance improvements. Scientists refer to the beneficial aspects of stress loads as allostasis, or the ability to achieve stability through change.
This seems obvious enough, but this is also where many training programs fall short. There’s more to these concepts than meets the eye.
The whole idea of “stress” as a physical manifestation of either physical, mental, or emotional challenges (and often a combination of the three) was the brain child of Dr. Hans Seyle, a then-29 year old endocrinologist. He noticed that many of the sick patients which he saw as a medical student and young clinician suffered from ‘non-specific bodily responses’ that didn’t align with the over-arching medical issue which brought them into the hospital. He began to suspect that the powerful chemicals which control much of our lives — our hormones — may be a prime culprit. He began to test his theory on lab rats (using techniques which are no longer allowed in research), and what he discovered confirmed his suspicions. Autopsies of the rats revealed three major changes: an enlargement of the adrenal glands, deterioration of the thymus and lymph nodes, and “hemorrhagic gastric erosions”, better known as ulcers. Together, these are now known as the “stress triad”.
His research was the first to identify the molecular cause of the stress reaction: glucocorticoids — steroids released from the adrenal cortex. The human body is a closed system with respect to hormones - once they are deployed, they must be metabolized, and this can take anywhere from hours to weeks, depending on the state of the bodily system. In other words, when the body becomes over-stressed, it responds by “flooding the zone” with glucocorticoids, which, instead of protecting the body, attack it from within.
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